


Turning From the Abyss

by taichara



Category: Bravely Default: Flying Fairy
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 04:50:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3434201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taichara/pseuds/taichara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Having pulled himself together -- and been faced with one dark fate after another -- he makes a resolution to break those black chains once and for all.  There will be no more loss, as long as he breathes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turning From the Abyss

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: _Any, Any, 'It's not for you to know but for you to weep and wonder / When the death of your civilization precedes you.'_

The memories flew swift and sharply at him now -- oh, irony -- tearing at him and driving him to gibbering madness inside, and all the while he struggled to keep up that hollow façade they knew as ‘Ringabel’. And a struggle it was, day after day after day of keeping that hellish pain inside before he dared to breathe a word. As long as that creature lurked, he did not dare to give himself away. Even if …

_Stay focused. You must not fail. I must not fail._

_Not this time. Not again._

_Never -- never again!_

The tempest inside howled in remembered pain, a pain reflected in the torments he’d heard in the voices of -- how many other selves has it been? too many, far too many -- 

_* they fell all around him, hard-won comrades, Edea, and he could do nothing *_

_* seeing himself hurl himself against them all, unknowing, unwitting, defeated, destroyed; ‘I’ve taken my dark powers from my own cooling corpse, what is wrong with me’ *_

_* another time, another … world: and now he’s lost, howling, raving, a grief-shattered madman begging himself for death *_

_* they fell, they fell they fell they FELL *_

All too clear, memories sharp and drawing blood -- Alternis, he was Alternis and he had failed, he continued to fail, destroyed by his own hand after the first and most damning of failures.

Because, to be cast selfless and empty into a place, into a _world_ , where he could take Alternis Dim’s life, then the answer -- the only answer -- was some first, some other, lost and ill-fated world. 

If that even _was_ the ‘first’.

_And still we keep doing this, again and again and again._   
_How many times must I watch myself lose everything?_   
_This time, this time it is over --!_

He’d lost it all to that hell-creature’s machinations. Over and over again, one way or the other; the world destroyed, comrades fallen and Edea lost forever, the same story with unending variation in every world they crossed.

Be _damned_ if he lost them again.

_Abomination, this time I end you first._


End file.
